Final Addendum on Bentham's Bulldog and Psychophysical Harmony

 Note; The replies here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my fellow co-authors.

Not too long ago, myself and friends of the blog Lucas Collier, Sebastian Montesinos and Joseph Lawal collaborated to create a comprehensive post on the argument from Psychophysical Harmony. Bentham's Bulldog (BB) recently replied to our post, which prompted a further blogpost from us, critiquing not only BB's specific misunderstandings and flawed responses to what we wrote, but the broader problems with the meta-philosophical commitments BB implicitly relies on. BB has now once again replied to our reply to his reply to our reply to Cutter and Crummet's Psychophysical Harmony argument. To the uninitiated reader, it is essential that you read the proceeding posts before this one. This will in all likelihood be the last reply in the series from our side at least (Notably, at-least two of my fellow coauthor's have already lost interest in this back and forth). This reply will be much briefer than our previous reply and original post, as BB does not make an effort to address a majority of what we wrote including our broad points about the meta-philosophical mistakes he makes in his reply to us, a mistake he repeats in his second reply [1].  In fact, of all our 10 sections, he only really engaged in a non-hand-wavy way with 3 of them. It is  those 3 that I will focus my attention on. 

Concerns 

As a reminder to the reader, the 'Concerns' section of our post relates to various views which avoid or otherwise undermine the assumptions implicit in the argument from psychophysical harmony. One minor point to begin with here is that BB states that he argues that each of these views are implausible. It is, however, a bit misleading to claim that he argued this. In fact, all he did was claim that they are implausible, because they have implications which he finds implausible. Of course, as we discuss at length in our reply to him, implausible to BB does not translate to implausible tout court. 

The main issue that we, in my view rightly, point out regarding BB's reply is that he addresses our section making comments that completely ignore, and fail to appreciate the broader dialectical point we were making with respect to why these alternative views are serious. BB replies as follows;

This claims strikes me as particularly baffling. For one, my post was not exclusively a reply to them. My post was a defense of the psychophysical harmony argument from pretty much all the objections that have ever been made to it. I cited them as a helpful source for explaining many of the objections and addressed the ones they raised. As such, it’s perfectly reasonable for me not to address everything they said in the article about the psychophysical harmony argument. If I’m making a cumulative case for some view, and a different piece argues that many other views can explain some piece of data, it’s reasonable to quote them without quoting their explanation of the dialectical context.

Second, it is reasonable not to quote everything everyone says in an article even when one disputes it. My piece, which was part 1 of a series, was already about 7,500 words and involved disputing things said by about a dozen different authors. When one quotes a book, for instance, even to disagree, they do not need to summarize all things said in the book for fear of misleading “a naive reader”—one so naive apparently that they’re unaware that when one quotes a source they are not quoting everything they’ve ever said.

Both of these points are moot, as the idea that our criticism of BB boils down to 'he doesn't quote everything we say' is at best misleading and reductive. Not once in our reply to him did we claim that BB is obligated to quote everything we write when giving a reply to us. It is, of course, not a problem that he doesn't quote everything we write.  The problem, to repeat, was that in his original reply BB strips our section from the context of the broader dialectical point we were making thus not only leading him to reply in such a way that misses the point of what we were arguing, but misrepresents us, deliberately or otherwise, to the naive reader of his blog whom didn't read our piece. Now, here he is, misrepresenting us yet again. Since I am a stickler for saving time, here is the relevant passage from our reply for needed context which BB left out;

BB does not try to reconstruct the dialectical point we were trying to make, instead he fails to even mention it and says things like “[these views] are all extremely implausible,” “if the atheist is forced to axiarchism…this argument has still accomplished a lot,” and later when responding to a statement in our first objection that references the concerns section, “The fact that an extreme minority view, whose opponents often find it utterly crazy, explains [PH] should be of little comfort to most people.” Put aside the fact that, if BB is implying that the credence most atheists will assign to the inclusive disjunction of the views we listed is extremely low, we certainly disagree. Our point was that we suspect that when most naturalists look at their web of beliefs, they will almost always prefer one or some of these views over theism, and that this has implications for a certain kind of dialectical claim about the psychophysical harmony argument. Note that this is consistent with a naturalist finding these views enormously implausible in general, so long as they find theism as or more implausible. He even reiterates a claim that we make—that there is a sense in which the argument has still “accomplished a lot”—as if it were a response to what we said, despite the fact that we said it ourselves, and it is therefore clearly not in tension with our own aim in this section.

Now, BB does say the following: “Whether [these views are] more implausible than theism will depend on one’s credence in theism…but I find [them] incredibly absurd.” This is the closest BB gets to referencing our point, and if BB intended merely to point out that these alternative views do not help him because his subjective credences cut overwhelmingly against them relative to theism, there would be no problem with what he said. However, it is then inappropriate for him to claim that the concerns about PH adduced in our piece are ‘lousy’ or ‘bad’. What he should say is that they are no help to him because they are in tension with his personal distribution of credences. Since we freely admitted that they would not help some people, this has nothing to do with our point in that section. What BB does (and this is a pattern throughout his response) is to equivocate between the extent to which a counter argument matches his own subjective intuitions and credences and the extent to which a counter argument has any merit in general. These two things are obviously not the same thing. BB therefore needs to either make it clear that his claims were merely about his own psychological states, or he needs to address the relevant dialectical context in which our argument was offered.

Most importantly, it was inappropriate for BB to not even mention or try to reconstruct that point we were making, and to offer responses to this section as if they engaged with our point when they did not. A naive reader would make the wrong assumptions about our claims in that section if they only read BB piece, because he omitted any discussion of our dialectical aims, and what he did say implies that our arguments were different than the ones we made.

BB also somewhat addresses our charges of more specific errors on  his part. He doesn't motivate his claim that error theory is implausible, aside from gesturing to other articles he wrote. He responds in more depth to the point I made defending that error theorists ought not be too concerned about the PH argument. He states the following. 

Their claim that “this misses the point” misses the point. On naturalism combined with error theory, one has no reason to think that pleasure and pain would pair with physical states in ways such that damage is correlated with pain and beneficial things are correlated with pleasure. Their claim is that if error theory is true then the same would be true on theism; that if pain isn’t bad and pleasure isn’t good then there’s no reason to think that pain, for example, would pair with harmful physical states. However, if error theory might be false, then one should update on the fact that pain pairs with harmful bodily stimuli and conclude that both theism and error theory are true.


Theism+moral realism explains why pain pairs with desctructive bodily stimuli. None of the other views do. So if one thinks theism is remotely plausible they should update in favor of theism+moral realism. Nothing that NN says remotely undermines this point.

Unsurprisingly, BB misunderstands the point. The point is not, as he says, that if error theory is true then theism doesn't predict that pain would lead to aversion-dispositional states (a point which is also true). The point is that the error theorist denies the data that theism is purported to explain, which is that our phenomenal states link up with our behavioral states in a normatively valuable way. The error theorist (or perhaps more accurately, the normative/value anti-realist) accepts that pain is linked up with aversion behavior, they don't accept that this link is normatively good, which is taken to be the surprising fact in need of explanation (of all possible psychophysical laws we ended up with the normatively good one). For the anti-realist, there isn't anything particularly special that cries out for explanation about our distribution of psychophysical laws, it wouldn't be more or less normatively good if pain was linked with, say, seeking-out behavior. While it's true that this does nothing to increase the probability of our distribution of psychophysical laws given naturalism, it does however, mean that we have no reason to take this particular distribution to be surprising.

BB appears to suggest that if we conjoin theism with moral realism and treat it as a broad hypothesis, this explains why pain pairs with destructive stimuli. Leaving aside the many reasons that this is questionable which we've already discussed at length (see, our section on Understated Evidence in particular), it is of negligible threat to the normative anti-realist that theism can explain the first order data, in part, by making second order philosophical judgements about the data which they ex hypothesi are committed to denying (namely, that the data is normatively good). Yes, the data is more likely on theism if you take for granted assumptions the anti-realist rejects, but given the anti-realist rejects said assumptions, the anti-realist need not find the data particularly surprising on naturalism together with their background knowledge.  

Understated Evidence 

Next we have BB's section on understated evidence. This section was, and still is in my view, the most egregious of his original post, with both of his points missing the mark and failing to actually engage with what we write. BB says the following:

Their criticism of psychophysical harmony claims that it understates the evidence—that while the world is harmonious in many respects, it is disharmonious in a sufficient number of respects that make it not strongly predicted on theism. In response, I claim that the theist will have to have some explanation for the many blemishes and imperfections of the world and this explanation will also explain the limited instances of psychophysical harmony. Montesinos and Benjamin say “We cited a wide array of different kinds of disharmony and most of it is not even prima facie explained by any theodicy we know of. To illustrate, let’s use just one example of disharmony we cited: that our perceptual beliefs about the richness of color perception in the periphery are false.”

Before I address this charge, I want to note that even if there aren’t theodicies that explain the data, this would mean that I am wrong, not that I “did not read this section carefully.” As it happens, I don’t really think any of the theodicies succeed, but I wouldn’t describe any person who raises a theodicy as having not read the things their critics say.

 The immediate issue with his reply is that it doesn't construe our point correctly, our point is not merely that theodicies don't explain the data it's that the data we cite is particularly resistant to standard theodicies, such as soul-building or free will, even if the standard theodicies can explain horrendous evils they cannot explain the various types of disharmony we listed. The perceptive reader could come to this conclusion on their own, hence our charge that BB did not read or at the very least think through our section carefully. A charge which will be somewhat vindicated with what he writes next;

As it so happens, I’ve listed some theodicies that are fairly general and explain all of the blemishes and imperfections in the world. The soul-binding theodicy claims that for us to remain the same through the beatific vision requires a fairly random assortment of experiences and, as a result, evils are neither expected nor unexpected. Skeptical theism, which is not technically a theodicy but is a defense against the problem of evil nonetheless, says we’re not in a position to ascertain the odds of various evils on theism. Finally, the free will theodicy given by Crummett says that evils in the world are the result of immoral acts taken by demons and programmers of the simulation.

BB starts by listing the soul-binding theodicy (which is not to be confused with the soul-building theodicy, a theodicy which we address and explain why it doesn't explain the data), this theodicy suggests that human experiences, including suffering and evil, are necessary for the soul's preparation to eventually experience the beatific vision, an ultimate, transcendent understanding of and union with the divine. This theodicy assumes the soul theory of personal identity, which while of course acceptable to theists is not going to be amendable to physicalists who dispute the PH argument (speaking for myself the epistemic probability of 'soul theory' is approximately 0, but then again, the same goes for omni-theism).

But we can safely leave that aside, I will even suppose that soul-binding explains horrendous suffering, since such experiences are necessary to fully appreciate the beatific vision. Does it explain the cases of disharmony we list? The answer is that it either doesn't, or it does but it removes any expectation we would otherwise have of PH on theism. The reason why I suspect it doesn't, is for, roughly the same reasons we think the soul-building theodicy is powerless to explain disharmony. Just as we see no reason whatsoever to think disharmonious states, such as for instance, false beliefs about color in our periphery contribute to virtue in a way suffering might, equally I see no reason whatsoever to think that disharmonious states contribute to spiritual development for the beatific vision in a way that suffering or otherwise bad experiences might. Is there a just-so story you can tell, such that our disharmonious states are necessary to fully appreciate the beatific vision? Certainly there is, but the same applies to the soul-building theodicy for theists who hold to an afterlife. Furthermore, there is such a story with seemingly no less plausibility that one could tell if we lived in a significantly more disharmonious world. If we accept that the kind of disharmonious states we have might cultivate spiritual development for whatever reason, why might that not be true of the world where everyone experiences static, or a variety of other worlds where the psychophysical laws are chaotic and unorderly? If BB wants to argue that the soul-binding theodicy off-sets the evidential problem created by disharmony, he can only do so, it seems, at the cost of giving us a nice little undercutting defeater to the argument from psychophysical harmony. 


He also brings up skeptical theism, while we do not address this in our original piece or our reply to him, there is an easy reason why appealing to ST won't work here. A notorious difficulty with skeptical theism is that it undermines the explanatory content of theism. How can we be justified in believing what God would do? By reasoning about divine psychology, or the weight of God's reasons. But that is precisely what ST does not allow us to do. Thus, if ST holds we cannot know that the weight of God's reasons favour creating a psychophysically harmonious world, and thus we cannot know, or be justified in believing that theism predicts such a world. So once again, this is a response that can only be made use of on pain of undermining the argument from psychophysical harmony [2]. This is a point acknowledged by skeptical theist Hud Hudson in the context of the fine-tuning argument, it is also why theistic evidentialists, including Crummett himself, tend not to be the biggest fans of the view.

Lastly he provides Crummet's free will theodicy, I will not say much here. I will just point out it runs into the same problem as the soul-binding (and soul-building) theodicy which is that insofar as it can be used to explain why our worlds disharmony, such as faulty colour perception, obtains on theism, it is difficult to see why it cannot also explain why other worlds disharmony obtains on theism. Perhaps the world where all our experiences are static is the result of free choice by the programmers of our simulated reality, and so on and so forth.

This is why we stress in our original piece that it is on the theist to give a principle for determining the explanatory content of theism such that, a) it is not ad hoc or relies on conditionalizing on the data b) it allows for theism to predict the harmony in our world, and c) it does not entail that theism predicts a world without the disharmony in our world. To be sure, this is a monumental task, so it's no surprise that BB does not take it up, but since this is the minimum of what would be required for BB to have successfully defended the PH argument from our objection, I must conclude that BB has failed. I suspect part of the problem here is, as we say in our reply to him, BB does not appear to think carefully about what to expect on theism. He seems to be under the impression that if certain theodicy's can explain evil, that this entails that they can also explain whatever disharmony we cite.

As regards to his second objection which we argue is more egregious, BB claims it basically reduces to the first objection.  This was not made clear in his original article and it seems strange that he would list it as a second objection and say they are two responses if it reduces to essentially the same one. I suspect that this is a serious case of damage control, though of course that is only a suspicion. In any case, since that is his only objection to us, and as we've seen the objection fails, there's nothing else to be said here.

The Revenge Problem

Last but not least is my section on the revenge problem. If you don't know what that is, you probably should have read the original post and our and BB's subsequent replies before reading this. Anyways, in our original piece I anticipated and argued against some objections to the problem BB replied, I replied back and so on. Fortunately, of BB's latest replies, his responses on the revenge problem are the most reasonable and do actually engage substantively with what was written.

One reply given is that theism is simple because it follows from a simple property like omnipotence or perfection. This can be used to explain God’s psychophysical harmony because a perfect being will necessarily be harmonious. Benjamin replies by suggesting that this response is unworkable on account of omnipotence or perfection requiring harmony. Something is omnipotent because of their power, not the other way around. Therefore, omnipotence assumes rather than explains psychophysical harmony.

In response, I argued that a property of parts can be explained in virtue of the whole. For instance, an apple pie may constitutively depend on its atoms, but the reason the atoms are as they are may depend on the apple pie (they are where they are because someone wanted to bake an apple pie). Benjamin expresses some confusion about the exact point that I was making and I don’t think my original piece was sufficiently clear. The idea is that the explanation for various parts that constitute a whole can depend on the whole itself. This will be especially true if there is such thing as top down causation, as dualists often suppose. If this is so then the theist has a good explanation of why God has these properties that would be implausible if brutely posited—they follow from perfection. Benjamin says “If we accept that an apple pie is dependent on its constituent atoms, then I have no idea what it is to further add that the atoms, in turn, constitutively depend on the pie as a whole.” It means that the facts about them are best explained in reference to facts about the apple pie. If you want to know why they are as they are, a helpful explanation will come by referencing the apple pie.

BB here clarifies that when he used the example of the apple pie, he was intending to invoke top-down causation or something like it, and supposedly the theist can, in a similar way make use of this to say that God's higher order property of perfection can explain his lower order 'psycho-divine' properties. Unfortunately, the point remains a bit unclear to me. For starters, if we're talking about top-down causation, that is still, at least as far as I'm aware, an asymmetric relation, contra the apple pie analogy. For example, if  higher order mental state M causes lower order brain event B, then B does not cause M. Cases where we have top-down causation, rule out bottom-up causation. Since I've argued that the theistic case is one where God's higher order properties such as perfection are explanatorily posterior to his lower order psycho-divine properties, it cannot be at the same time, and in the same relevant sense, explanatorily prior to those properties. Perhaps more crucially, though, the kind of explanatory relation being discussed is not a causal relation. God's psycho-divine properties do not 'cause' his perfection or omnipotence to obtain, rather his omnipotence, and perfection ontologically and conceptually depend on his lower order properties. Thus, top-down causation would not be applicable here. Maybe what he has in mind is not strictly that the relation is that of top-down causation, but something analogous to it. But then, it remains unclear what relation he has in mind. Onto the next! 

Next, Benjamin addresses the claim that theism isn’t vulnerable to the challenge because it posits simple laws of the form “that which God wills, is.” He claims in his original piece “God's laws could be stated as "God can will anything" or it can be stated as "God can will X, & Y & Z and so on" for some infinite, or astronomically large set of states of affairs.” This is what I was addressing when I said “The approach where you just list all the things that can be done given by TT is clearly unworkable—it implies full omnipotence is no more complicated than omnipotence minus being able to perform one random fact.” Benjamin notes that I haven’t given a good reason why that implication is false. It’s true that I don’t give any additional reason why it’s false. But I submit that any view that implies an omnipotent being is no more likely than a being that is almost omnipotent but can’t do five random things is false. This implication strikes me as very implausible and I think views having very implausible implications gives one a reason to reject them. If you ask most ordinary people whether they think God is more likely than a being that can do everything except, for example, create squirrels, they will report that he is.

BB does not say anything to show that omnipotence is more probable than other distributions of causal laws, wherein a semi-omnipotent being can do almost anything but when it tries to will a squirrel into existence it fails or causes something else instead. He says it's implausible to him, which is fine, but we already made clear in our original post that we are not impressed by appeals to bare intuition. I'll just note that I do not share this intuition, as I'm skeptical that omnipotence is an epistemically possible property, and even if it is, it doesn't strike me as a distribution that is less, or at least any non-insignificant degree less a priori theoretically complex than other distributions such as where the causal laws are otherwise identical but link a state of attempting to create squirrels with the outcome of creating water bottles instead etc. Insofar as I would think that is more complex, I'd also probably think that many of the cases of disharmony Cutter & Crummett cite are also more complex [3].

 He claims that most ordinary people would think God is more likely than a semi-omnipotent being, this is probably true,  but this is so because most people are committed theists in general, not because of a genuine assessment and pre-theoretic intuition about the relative probabilities. Perhaps BB wants to say that absent broader theoretical commitments, people would still take God to be more likely than a semi-omnipotent being. Certainly, that might be true, but it's not something BB can figure out from the armchair, it's a claim that requires empirical evidence, evidence which does not exist.  

BB expresses agreement with my second point that even if we grant that God's laws are simpler, theism still has an extremely low prior. Onto the next! 

My claim is about what to do under conditions of uncertainty. If there is some possibility that explains an otherwise miraculous fact, and it might have a very low probability or might have a pretty high probability, based on its explanatory power you should think it’s more likely that it has a high probability. To see this, suppose that there are two possibilities: first that a royal flush is a very special arrangement of a deck of cards, second that a royal flush is just a random arrangement of a deck of cards. One is evaluating two hypotheses: the first claims that a deck is rigged and the second claims it isn’t.

Given that the deck is rigged+royal flush is special hypothesis explains this otherwise implausible event, if one is initially unsure of how to calculate the prior probability of the hypothesis they should then think that the royal flush being special hypothesis is more likely. Similarly, if you’re not sure what the prior probability of theism is, and then you get good evidence for theism, you should update in favor of views that give it a higher prior.

The example here is not analogous because we aren't talking about a case where a hypothesis may or may not have a low prior probability, it is a case where I've argued that if we accept that the data has an astronomically low prior probability, then we should, for the same reasons believe that theism, mutatis mutandis, has a correspondingly astronomically low prior probability.  For the example BB uses, the hypothesis that the royal flush is rigged, and a special arrangement of cards is not significantly more complex and inherently unlikely than the hypothesis that the royal flush is not rigged and is a random arrangement of cards.

More analogous would be the alien analogy I provided in my original reply and which BB does not acknowledge. If Fred wins the lottery, that is a miraculous event on the assumption that it occurred by chance, the odds are one in hundreds of millions. However, the event is not unlikely if we suppose that aliens rigged the lottery in Fred's favor. The problem, of course, is that the alien hypothesis has an extremely low prior probability from the start, as it posits not only that there are aliens which visited our planet, but they, for reasons inexplicable to us, take a keen interest in Fred winning the lottery. Does BB think we should believe aliens rigged the lottery after conditionalizing on the data of Fred winning due to it's explanatory power? I would hope not! Similarly, for the same reasons that our psychophysical laws have an extremely low prior, the hypothesis that there is an all powerful, all good, and all knowing being which implies a no less extensive distribution of causal laws that link his actions and his mental states with external states of affairs in fortunate ways also has an extremely low prior. Last one! 

This is not true! To see this, let’s distinguish first-order and second-order methods of assigning prior probabilities. A first-order method describes the ideal way to assign priors—it would give a formula for deciding upon them. A second-order method would tell you how to assign priors given uncertainty about the first-order methods. In this way, a second-order method is analogous to a theory of how to act under moral uncertainty.

I submit that one should, to assign priors, take the various views that they have some credence in about assigning priors, and multiply the prior those theories give to some hypothesis by the odds they give to that hypothesis being true. For example, if there are two ways of deciding on prior probabilities, and I’m split 50/50 between them, and one says that God is certain to exist and the other says God is certain not to exist, I should take the average and start God with a 50% prior. Similarly, in this case, if one is not sure exactly how to take prior probabilities, because there are some views on which God is very intrinsically probable, they should give it a non-trivial second-order prior.

In response to my last objection, BB distinguishes here between first order and second order methods of assigning prior probabilities. While an interesting suggestion, it is highly unclear to me how it is supposed to help. For what informs how we assign priors to the various ways of distributing priors in the first place? Surely, if this suggestion were to have any plausibility it isn't just our arbitrary whims which decides it.  Surely, there must be some principled way we demarcate the relative credence's or probabilities of various first order views on assigning priors be it by virtue of their relative theoretical virtues or what have you. But then, this principled way, would just be our first order theory of assigning prior probabilities and thus the distinction collapses. BB supposes that it is coherent to  step outside our theories of assigning prior probabilities when making judgements about prior probabilities. I don't think that's right, indeed I would go so far as to say I don't even know what that is. All judgements of assigning prior probabilities are dependent on a prior theory, and that theory is where the buck stops. 

Conclusion

As stated, this likely will be the last installment on this back and forth from our side. In this latest reply, BB is somewhat indignant, which is understandable, we were harsh in our reply to him, but, I think, for good reason. We want to raise the bar of philosophical engagement, and our position was, and still is, that BB's response to us was a case of poor, low effort, engagement. This reply is another case of this, he did not engage with the majority of our criticisms including our most important ones, and what he did respond to begot further misunderstandings which suggest he did not think carefully about what we wrote. This is likely because he released his response to our 15k word effortpost practically the following day.  A back and forth like this, is one that I do not find worthwhile. Read this in the most gentle way possible, as my intention is not hostile. But, unless or until BB either shows signs of bona fide reflection on why we would all together publicly admonish his philosophical virtue, or otherwise takes more time to put effort into engaging with us on this topic, this can probably be considered my last piece of philosophical engagement with the blogger known as Bentham's Bulldog.  

Footnotes

[1] See Bentham Bulldog's latest reply to Sebastian Montesinos on Normative Harmomy as an example. 

[2] BB does address this in his third 'For Theism' post, but I take it to be a non-response. He claims that the ST can consistently say that God would create a valuable state of affairs that involves flourishing agents even if we can't know what's required for what is ultimately valuable. However, what the ST holds is a general principle stating that we can never be justified in judgements about  the total weight of God's reasons or the ultima facie value of states of affairs. Insofar as this principle entails that we cannot be justified in our judgements about whether God would permit evil or disvaluable states,  it is utterly  unclear why it does not also entail that we cannot be justified in our judgements about particular valuable states God would create.  BB does not show any relevant asymmetry aside from baldy asserting otherwise, which gets us nowhere.

[3] See in particular Joseph Jawals section on Causation and Explanation for why.